Bathing Green-winged Teal Drake

[Stephen Stephen]

I haven't posted in quite some time as things have kept me way from photography. There have been 3 of these little drakes at one of our local ponds. I spent around 30 minutes trying to position myself along the shore to the place where this bird was swimming around.

I created several images of this duck during the bathing sequence, the first image has bird's bill is open. It's my favourite of the sequence but unfortunately the bird's head was very close to the top edge of the image frame. I added some canvas but I'm not happy with the results yet. I may post that image after I reprocess it.

Canon 40D and SIgma 50-500mm at 500mm on Manfroto monopod. 1/1600 sec, f/6.3, ISO Equiv.: 320 No flash.

Image full frame.

http://i153.photobucket.com/albums/s219/Squidcan/Birds3/GreenwingTeal44.jpg

[Axel Hildebrandt]

I like the pose, splash and sharpness and only wish the brownish area in the upper right were not there.

[Paul Lagasi]

Stephen these guys put on quite a show for a few months..unreal how close we got to them..I like the comp, colors, sharpness...I'd have liked just a hint more of headturn..I'd be glad to have this in my files.
Thanks for sharing

[joshua LaCelle]

Love the pose on this one Stephen! Very nice work!

[Harshad Barve]

beautiful image , nice compo and control on techs , water splash is terific
TFS

[Daniel Cadieux]

With the ponds now frozen over these guys have left for wetter pastures :-) Good thing we took advantage of their cooperative nature! Nice splashing action you managed to capture here. I like the flash of green iridescence coming out of the water.

[Stephen Stephen]

Thank you Axel, Paul, Harshad, Joshua and Dan.

Axel the brownish area is the reflection of a Canada goose. I manged to keep the actual bird out of the frame but I couldn't do anything about its reflection.